The Casual Vacancy (11 page)

The room was warm and spotless. Shelving units on either side of the gas fire displayed an array of ornamental china, nearly all of it commemorating some royal landmark or anniversary of the reign of Elizabeth II. A small bookcase in the corner contained a mixture of royal biographies and the glossy cookbooks that had overrun the kitchen. Photographs adorned the shelves and walls: Miles and his younger sister Patricia beamed from a twin frame in matching school uniforms; Miles and Samantha’s two daughters, Lexie and Libby, were represented over and again from babyhood to teens. Samantha figured only once in the family gallery, though in one of the largest and most prominent pictures. It showed her and Miles’ wedding day sixteen years before. Miles was young and handsome, piercing blue eyes crinkled at the photographer, whereas Samantha’s eyes were closed in a half blink, her face was turned sideways, her chin was doubled by her smile at a different lens. The white satin of her dress strained across breasts already swollen with her early pregnancy, making her look huge.

One of Maureen’s thin clawlike hands was playing with the chain she always wore around her neck, on which hung a crucifix and her late husband’s wedding ring. When Samantha reached the point in her story where the doctor told Mary that there was nothing they could do, Maureen put her free hand on Samantha’s knee and squeezed.

“Dishing up!” called Shirley. Though she had not wanted to come, Samantha felt better than she had in two days. Maureen and Howard were treating her like a mixture of heroine and invalid, and both of them patted her gently on the back as she passed them on her way into the dining room.

Shirley had turned down the dimmer switch, and lit long pink candles to match the wallpaper and the best napkins. The steam rising from their soup plates in the gloom made even Howard’s wide, florid face look otherworldly. Having drunk almost to the bottom of her big wineglass, Samantha thought how funny it would be if Howard announced that they were about to hold a séance, to ask Barry for his own account of the events at the golf club.

“Well,” said Howard, in a deep voice, “I think we ought to raise our glasses to Barry Fairbrother.”

Samantha tipped back her glass quickly, to stop Shirley seeing that she had already downed most of its contents.

“It was almost certainly an aneurysm,” announced Miles, the instant the glasses had landed back on the tablecloth. He had withheld this information even from Samantha, and he was glad, because she might have squandered it just now, while talking to Maureen and Howard. “Gavin phoned Mary to give the firm’s condolences and touch base about the will, and Mary confirmed it. Basically, an artery in his head swelled up and burst” (he had looked up the term on the Internet, once he had found out how to spell it, back in his office after speaking to Gavin). “Could have happened at any time. Some sort of inborn weakness.”

“Ghastly,” said Howard; but then he noticed that Samantha’s glass was empty, and heaved himself out of his chair to top it up. Shirley drank soup for a while with her eyebrows hovering near her hairline. Samantha slugged down more wine in defiance.

“D’you know what?” she said, her tongue slightly unwieldy. “I thought I saw him on the way here. In the dark. Barry.”

“I expect it was one of his brothers,” said Shirley dismissively. “They’re all alike.”

But Maureen croaked over Shirley, drowning her out.

“I thought I saw Ken, the evening after he died. Clear as day, standing in the garden, looking up at me through the kitchen window. In the middle of his roses.”

Nobody responded; they had heard the story before. A minute passed, full of nothing but soft slurps, then Maureen spoke again with her raven’s caw.

“Gavin’s quite friendly with the Fairbrothers, isn’t he, Miles? Doesn’t he play squash with Barry?
Didn’t
he, I should say.”

“Yeah, Barry thrashed him once a week. Gavin must be a lousy player; Barry had ten years on him.”

Near identical expressions of complacent amusement touched the candlelit faces of the three women around the table. If nothing else, they had in common a slightly perverse interest in Miles’ stringy young business partner. In Maureen’s case, this was merely a manifestation of her inexhaustible appetite for all the gossip of Pagford, and the goings-on of a young bachelor were prime meat. Shirley took a particular pleasure in hearing all about Gavin’s inferiorities and insecurities, because these threw into delicious contrast the achievements and self-assertion of the twin gods of her life, Howard and Miles. But in the case of Samantha, Gavin’s passivity and caution awoke a feline cruelty; she had a powerful desire to see him slapped awake, pulled into line or otherwise mauled by a feminine surrogate. She bullied him a little in person whenever they met, taking pleasure in the conviction that he found her overwhelming, hard to handle.

“So how are things going, these days,” asked Maureen, “with his lady friend from London?”

“She’s not in London anymore, Mo. She’s moved into Hope Street,” said Miles. “And if you ask me, he’s regretting he ever went near her. You know Gavin. Born with cold feet.”

Miles had been a few years above Gavin at school, and there was forever a trace of the sixth-form prefect in the way he spoke about his business partner.

“Dark girl? Very short hair?”

“That’s her,” said Miles. “Social worker. Flat shoes.”

“Then we’ve had her in the deli, haven’t we, How?” said Maureen excitedly. “I wouldn’t have had her down as much of a cook, though, not by the look of her.”

Roast loin of pork followed the soup. With the connivance of Howard, Samantha was sliding gently toward contented drunkenness, but something in her was making forlorn protests, like a man swept out to sea. She attempted to drown it in more wine.

A pause rolled out across the table like a fresh tablecloth, pristine and expectant, and this time everybody seemed to know that it was for Howard to set out the new topic. He ate for a while, big mouthfuls washed down with wine, apparently oblivious to their eyes upon him. Finally, having cleared half his plate, he dabbed at his mouth with his napkin and spoke.

“Yes, it will be interesting to see what happens on council now.” He was forced to pause to suppress a powerful burp; for a moment he looked as if he might be sick. He thumped his chest. “Pardon me. Yes. It’ll be very interesting indeed. With Fairbrother gone” — businesslike, Howard reverted to the form of the name he habitually used — “I can’t see his article for the paper coming off. Unless Bends-Your-Ear takes it on, obviously,” he added.

Howard had dubbed Parminder Jawanda “Bends-Your-Ear Bhutto” after her first attendance as a parish councillor. It was a popular joke among the anti-Fielders.

“The look on her face,” said Maureen, addressing Shirley. “The look on her face, when we told her. Well…I always thought…
you
know…”

Samantha pricked up her ears, but Maureen’s insinuation was surely laughable. Parminder was married to the most gorgeous man in Pagford: Vikram, tall and well made, with an aquiline nose, eyes fringed with thick black lashes, and a lazy, knowing smile. For years, Samantha had tossed back her hair and laughed more often than necessary whenever she paused in the street to pass the time of day with Vikram, who had the same kind of body Miles had had before he had given up rugby and become soft and paunchy.

Samantha had heard somewhere, not long after they had become her neighbors, that Vikram and Parminder had had an arranged marriage. She had found this idea unspeakably erotic. Imagine being
ordered
to marry Vikram,
having
to do it; she had wrought a little fantasy in which she was veiled and shown into a room, a virgin condemned to her fate…Imagine looking up, and knowing you were getting
that…
Not to mention the additional frisson of his job: that much responsibility would have given a much uglier man sex appeal…

(Vikram had performed Howard’s quadruple bypass, seven years previously. In consequence, Vikram could not enter Mollison and Lowe without being subjected to a barrage of jocular banter.

“To the head of the queue, please, Mr. Jawanda! Move aside, please, ladies — no, Mr. Jawanda, I insist — this man saved my life, patched up the old ticker — what will it be, Mr. Jawanda, sir?”

Howard always insisted that Vikram take free samples and a little extra of everything he bought. In consequence, Samantha suspected, of these antics, Vikram almost never entered the delicatessen anymore.)

She had lost the thread of the conversation, but it did not matter. The others were still droning on about something that Barry Fairbrother had written to the local paper.

“…was going to have to talk to him about it,” boomed Howard. “It was a very underhand way of doing things. Well, well, that’s water under the bridge now.

“What we should be thinking about is who’s going to replace Fairbrother. We shouldn’t underestimate Bends-Your-Ear, however upset she might be. That would be a great mistake. She’s probably trying to rustle up somebody already, so we ought to be thinking about a decent replacement ourselves. Sooner rather than later. Simple matter of good governance.”

“What will that mean, exactly?” Miles asked. “An election?”

“Possibly,” said Howard, with a judicious air, “but I doubt it. It’s only a casual vacancy. If there isn’t enough interest in an election — though, as I say, we must not underestimate Bends-Your-Ear — but if she can’t raise nine people to propose a public vote, it’ll be a simple question of co-opting a new councillor. In that case, we’d need nine members’ votes to get the co-option ratified. Nine’s the quorum. Three years of Fairbrother’s term of office left to run. Worth it. Could swing the whole thing, putting one of our side in, instead of Fairbrother.”

Howard drummed his thick fingers against the bowl of his wineglass, looking at his son across the table. Both Shirley and Maureen were watching Miles too, and Miles, Samantha thought, was looking back at his father like a big fat Labrador, quivering in expectation of a treat.

A beat later than she would have done if she had been sober, Samantha realized what this was all about, and why a strangely celebratory air hung over the table. Her intoxication had been liberating, but all of a sudden it was restrictive, for she was not sure that her tongue would be wholly biddable after more than a bottle of wine and a long stretch of silence. She therefore thought the words, rather than speaking them aloud.

You’d better bloody well tell them you’ll need to discuss it with me first, Miles.

VII

Tessa Wall had not meant to stay long at Mary’s — she was never comfortable about leaving her husband and Fats alone in the house together — but somehow her visit had stretched to a couple of hours. The Fairbrothers’ house was overflowing with camp beds and sleeping bags; their extended family had closed in around the gaping vacuum left by death, but no amount of noise and activity could mask the chasm into which Barry had vanished.

Alone with her thoughts for the first time since their friend had died, Tessa retraced her steps down Church Row in the darkness, her feet aching, her cardigan inadequate protection against the cold. The only noise was the clicking of the wooden beads around her neck, and the dim sounds of television sets in the houses she was passing.

Quite suddenly, Tessa thought:
I wonder whether Barry knew.

It had never occurred to her before that her husband might have told Barry the great secret of her life, the rotten thing that lay buried at the heart of her marriage. She and Colin never even discussed it (though a whiff of it tainted many a conversation, particularly lately…).

Tonight, though, Tessa had thought she caught half a glance from Mary, at the mention of Fats…

You’re exhausted, and you’re imagining things,
Tessa told herself firmly. Colin’s habits of secrecy were so strong, so deeply entrenched, that he would never have told; not even Barry, whom he idolized. Tessa hated to think that Barry might have known…that his kindness toward Colin had been actuated by pity for what she, Tessa, had done…

When she entered the sitting room, she found her husband sitting in front of the television, wearing his glasses, the news on in the background. He had a sheaf of printed papers in his lap and a pen in his hand. To Tessa’s relief, there was no sign of Fats.

“How is she?” Colin asked.

“Well, you know…not great,” said Tessa. She sank into one of the old armchairs with a little moan of relief, and pulled off her worn-down shoes. “But Barry’s brother’s being marvelous.”

“In what way?”

“Well…you know…helping.”

She closed her eyes and massaged the bridge of her nose and her eyelids with her thumb and forefinger.

“I always thought he seemed a bit unreliable,” said Colin’s voice.

“Really?” said Tessa, from the depths of her voluntary darkness.

“Yes. Remember when he said he’d come and referee for that game against Paxton High? And he canceled with about half an hour’s notice and Bateman had to do it instead?”

Tessa fought down an impulse to snap. Colin had a habit of making sweeping judgments based on first impressions, on single actions. He never seemed to grasp the immense mutability of human nature, nor to appreciate that behind every nondescript face lay a wild and unique hinterland like his own.

“Well, he’s being lovely with the kids,” said Tessa carefully. “I’ve got to go to bed.”

She did not move, but sat concentrating on the separate aches in different parts of her body: in her feet, her lower back, her shoulders.

“Tess, I’ve been thinking.”

“Hmm?”

Glasses shrank Colin’s eyes to molelike proportions, so that the high, balding knobbly forehead seemed even more pronounced.

“Everything Barry was trying to do on the Parish Council. Everything he was fighting for. The Fields. The addiction clinic. I’ve been thinking about it all day.” He drew a deep inward breath. “I’ve pretty much decided that I’m going to take over for him.”

Misgivings crashed over Tessa, pinning her to her chair, rendering her momentarily speechless. She struggled to keep her expression professionally neutral.